The Battle of Plataea, 479 BC

Xerxes had invaded Greece the summer before with the whole strength of the Persian empire, and it had gone wrong for him at Salamis, where he lost his fleet. He went back to Asia and left his brother-in-law Mardonius behind with the land army and the task of finishing the conquest. Late in the summer of 479 BC the allied Greek cities marched out to meet that army with the largest force they had ever assembled, Spartans and Athenians and their allies under Pausanias, regent of Sparta, and found it camped on the plain near the small town of Plataea in Boeotia. The Greeks took the ridges under Kithairon above the plain and stopped there.

For eleven days nothing happened, and the nothing was the battle.

Both commanders knew exactly what they needed and neither could get it. Mardonius had the cavalry, and cavalry needs open flat ground, so he wanted the Greeks down off the ridges and out onto the plain. Pausanias had the heavy infantry, and a phalanx on broken rising ground is close to unbreakable and on a plain is a target, so he wanted to stay where he was. So they sat and looked at each other under an August sun in Boeotia, and the Persian horse came out every day to shoot into the Greek line and ride away from it, and neither man would move first.

Then Mardonius did the thing that wins sieges and starves armies: he went for the water. His cavalry fouled the spring the Greeks were drinking from and cut the supply road over the passes. That worked. An army of a hundred thousand men in high summer with no water does not get to choose its ground any more.

Pausanias ordered a night withdrawal to a better position, and a night withdrawal by a coalition army is one of the hardest things soldiers do. It went wrong, exactly as such things do. Contingents moved at different times, some went too far, some misunderstood the line, and one Spartan officer is supposed to have refused to retreat at all and argued about it until dawn. When the sun came up the Greek army was scattered across several miles in three separate groups, out of mutual support, in the open.

Mardonius looked at that and drew the obvious conclusion, which was that they were running. He was not being stupid. It looked precisely like an army coming apart, and if he was right the war ended that morning. He sent his whole army across the Asopus after them.

The Spartans and Tegeans, eleven and a half thousand of them, were caught on open ground by Persian infantry and knelt behind their shields while the arrows came down, and would not move, because the sacrifices had not yet given a favourable sign and Pausanias would not attack until they did. Men were being killed where they knelt. He kept sacrificing. You may believe what you like about the omens; what I will tell you is that it held them in place long enough for the Persian line to close to a range where the thing they were good at became possible.

Then the sign came, and they stood up, and the Persians had come close enough to be reached.

Persian infantry at Plataea were not cowards and the sources are clear about it. They came at the Spartan line, grabbed the spears with their hands, broke them off, kept coming. It did not matter. They were fighting men in bronze, shoulder to shoulder, with eight-foot spears and a shield wall, and they had wicker and linen and courage. Herodotus says their bravery and strength were equal and their armour was not, and that is as fair a sentence as anybody has written about it.

Mardonius was in the middle of it on a white horse, which is not a detail that improves your chances, and a stone from a Spartan hand took him in the head and killed him. His bodyguard, a thousand picked men, died around him. And then the army that had crossed a continent to be there stopped being an army, and ran for the wooden stockade they had built, and the Greeks came through the timber and killed them inside it.

Herodotus says a hundred and fifty-nine Greeks died. It is not true and no one believes it, and Plutarch says thirteen hundred and sixty, and other counts run higher still. Herodotus also says that of the Persian army only three thousand survived, which is likewise not true. Both numbers are doing the same work from opposite ends: making the day look like the gods rather than like men.

I keep no such books. I can tell you that the ratio was very lopsided and that lopsided is not the same as free, and that the Greek dead were carried off and buried by tribe with their names known and spoken, and the Persian dead were tipped into the ground where they lay by people who did not speak their language and had no reason to ask.

I asked. I always ask. It is the only question I have.